it was an experience where i had gotten to know them, and it wasjust a small community. it was a group of people who are now some of the most important in my life, but they were people who cared about the world around them and they also cared about each other. and i was a person who represented the terror and fear that they d had their whole lives, many of them. and yet i was saying, i m somebody who cares about you personally, i want to be a good friend. and they said, well, how can you be a good friend and be representing and advocating a belief system that says i don t belong? and the feeling that i don t want to be that person came a lot sooner than the rationality. and there s this lesson that i look back on it. it took me years of sitting in private conversations with one specific person i met at shabbat dinners that i had been invited to on campus. friday night dinners. friday night observant jewish dinners, yeah. is this allison, who s now your wife? yeah. who had to sit wi
i sat with for years who caused me to change my life. it was an experience where i had gotten to know them, and it wasjust a small community. it was a group of people who are now some of the most important in my life, but they were people who cared about the world around them and they also cared about each other. and i was a person who represented the terror and fear that they d had their whole lives, many of them. and yet i was saying, i m somebody who cares about you personally, i want to be a good friend. and they said, well, how can you be a good friend and be representing and advocating a belief system that says i don t belong? and the feeling that i don t want to be that person came a lot sooner than the rationality. and there s this lesson that i look back on it. it took me years of sitting in private conversations with one specific person i met at shabbat dinners that i had been invited to on campus. friday night dinners. friday night observant
friday night dinners. friday night observant jewish dinners, yeah. is this allison, who s now your wife? yeah, who had to sit with me and talk about all the supposed facts that i thought backed up my belief system. i didn t want to be a person who caused harm to other people, who caused fear to people i cared about. i wanted to be expansive. and yet i believe that i had justified race as this biological fact, that all these old men who were tenured professors and condemned as white supremacists must be the truth tellers. and i had to sit for years, one piece at a time, learning that the statistics that they cited were false, learning that their arguments for biological race were just ridiculous and had been disproven 100 times. even in this period, derek, when you are going through what you re describing, you go and spend time with david duke, don t you? you spend several days with david duke? yeah. you speak of your at the point you publicly